My garden is wall to wall brambles..... you are welcome to come and pick them any time. I only have one request, as you fight your way through the prickly beasties you dig them up and take them with you

UnNatural Scientist - Currently working on a Breville-legged monkeyLocation: Bath Uni or Shrewsbury, UK

Total posts: 757

Posted:13th Sep 2005I go blackberry picking with my dad occationally. I think he enjoys it because it reminds him of his childhood - and he uses them to make blackberry and apple pie (apples from the garden) - reeeeeeeeally good

Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can beat the world into submission.

When i came back to my uni house (sunday) we found that the garden had produced three apple trees woth of apples, raspberries, rhubarb, red currant, and of course blackberries. It was amazing!!

As me and my housemates contemplated what we would do with our abundent fruit the next day, we found (to our outrage) that the gardener our landlay had sent round was scrumping our apples an picking our berries. We sent our housemate out to tell him off, but the sodding gardener still helped himself to a few more apples when he thought we'd gone away from the window. The cheeky sod!!!

So two hours later, we picked the remaining red, currents, blackberries and apples and made the thickest, fruitiest smoothies ever made.

Posted:15th Sep 2005mmnnnn love berry smoothies.. I often freeze them, with some banannas, so I can have a touch of summer when the snow comes...

Favorite thing to do with blackberries at the moment, make a marinade out of a big pile of fresh ones, add in sesame oil, butter, lemon rind,lemon jiuce, lots of garlic, honey, fresh crushed pepper corns, fresh rosemary and thyme, a wee bit of chili, salt, dash of soy sauce, and a few table spoons of balsamic vinegar...( feel free to add anything else from the fridge door that interests you ;-))

Martinate a free range chicken in it for a half day, and that night roast it over a grill,basting often .Keep it covered with foil for most of the time, then crisp up the top at the last bit... Add some of the drippings to a roasting pan of veggies( marinate them for a shorter while in the same mix if you want to!)- we did purple bell pepper, eggplant, onions, purple potatoes, carrots and beets, broccolli added later... You can even make a jiucy gravy from remaining drippings.

The coolest thing is, apart from being ridiculously delicious, it is brilliantly purple! Everything! The whole meal! What fun!

Everyone should come to the meal also dressed in purple, and we had blackberries on ice cream for desert too... and a nice berry port...

Posted:15th Sep 2005oh yum, fresh picked berries are possibly the most delicious things in the world-last year we picked 55 pounds of strawberries, and the strawberry shortcake we made was seriously the most wonderful thing I've ever eaten! Sadly, berry season is pretty much over here-I missed out on the raspberries this year! But apple season is almost here, hooray!

"I know a good deal more than a boiled carrot.""Fire!" "Where?" "Nowhere, I was just illustrating the misuse of free speech."